Introduction and Goals; Data Types, Operators, and Variables

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PROFESSOR: Good morning. Try it again. Good morning.

STUDENTS: Good morning.

PROFESSOR: Thank you. This is 6.00, also known as Introduction to Computer Science and Programming. My name is Eric Grimson, I have together Professor John Guttag over here, we're going to be lecturing the course this term. I want to give you a heads up; you're getting some serious firepower this term. John was department head for ten years, felt like a century, and in course six, I'm the current department head in course six. John's been lecturing for thirty years, roughly. All right, I'm the young guy, I've only been lecturing for twenty-five years. You can tell, I have less grey hair than he does. What I'm trying to say to you is, we take this course really seriously. We hope you do as well. But we think it's really important for the department to help everybody learn about computation, and that's what this course is about.

What I want to do today is three things: I'm going to start — actually, I shouldn't say start, I'm going to do a little bit of administrivia, the kinds of things you need to know about how we're going to run the course. I want to talk about the goal of the course, what it is you'll be able to do at the end of this course when you get through it, and then I want to begin talking about the concepts and tools of computational thinking, which is what we're primarily going to focus on here. We're going to try and help you learn how to think like a computer scientist, and we're going to begin talking about that towards the end of this lecture and of course throughout the rest of the lectures that carry on.

Right, let's start with the goals. I'm going to give you goals in two levels. The strategic goals are the following: we want to help prepare freshmen and sophomores who are interested in majoring in course six to get an easy entry into the department, especially for those students who don't have a lot of prior programming experience. If you're in that category, don't panic, you're going to get it. We're going to help you ramp in and you'll certainly be able to start the course six curriculum and do just fine and still finish on target. We don't expect everybody to be a course six major, contrary to popular opinion, so for those are you not in that category, the second thing we want to do is we want to help students who don't plan to major in course six to feel justifiably confident in their ability to write and read small pieces of code.

For all students, what we want to do is we want to give you an understanding of the role computation can and cannot play in tackling technical problems. So that you will come away with a sense of what you can do, what you can't do, and what kinds of things you should use to tackle complex problems.

And finally, we want to position all students so that you can easily, if you like, compete for things like your office and summer jobs. Because you'll have an appropriate level of confidence and competence in your ability to do computational problem solving. Those are the strategic goals.

Now, this course is primarily aimed at students who have little or no prior programming experience.